The Man of Feeling

A review of Peter Read's Haunted Earth (University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2003)

Proximate Reading: Australian Literature in Transnational Reading Frameworks

Introduces the concept of proximate reading

Negotiating the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Archive

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Recovering Australian Popular Fiction: towards the end of Australian literature

The paper argues that popular fiction has been ignored in the 'officially sanctioned' account of Australian literature and that this is a serious failure

Colonial Modernity, Native Species and E.J. Brady’s ‘The Friar-Bird’s Sermon: An Australian Fable’

Jussi Parikka has talked about the mobilisation of animals and insects into 'technological modernity', as a particular way of making them visible. I want to look at the way native species in Australia were mobilised in the framework of colonial modernity. Species classification and species extinction happened almost simultaneously: someone like John Gould is important here, for example. Species visibility thus brings two competing but intertwined realities into play. I want to look at a colonial animal fable, E.J. Brady's 'The Friar Bird's Sermon' (1897), which works by gathering native species together, making them visible (even allowing them to 'speak'), and classifying them: but all within the cultural logics of colonial modernity. This story is a subgenre of the animal fable that owes something to Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowles — attributing human/citizen characteristics to (in this case) native species, and so inserting them into the colonial project. Written partly in reaction to Adam Lindsay Gordon's dismissive view of local species, the story recovers a native ecology but only by suppressing the realities of extinction and burying the effects of colonialism itself. Brady went on to publish a paean to Australian settlement and land development, Unlimited Australia (1918)

Literary Journals and Literary Aesthetics in Early Post-Federation Australia

The first decade after Federation saw the establishment of a significant number of new Australian literary journals and magazines, some of which defined themselves against mainstream literary interests – against the Bulletin, for example. What we see here is in fact a splintering of literary activity across a number of journals that fragments (or perhaps continues to fragment) any received sense of what constitutes a national literature. This paper looks at three of Thomas C. Lothian’s Melbourne journals - the Native Companion (January - December 1907), Trident (May 1907 – April 1909) and Heart of the Rose (December 1907 – October 1908) – and also briefly discusses Alfred Dickson and Frank Wilmot’s The Microbe, and Hal Stone and the ‘Waysider’ group’s Ye Kangaroo (1902 –1905), Ye Wayside Goose (1905 – 1906) and Red Ant (1912), also mostly Melbourne-based. The Native Companion in particular nourished an early feminine modernist aesthetic: publishing Katharine Mansfield’s first short stories, first example, and providing space for a coterie of women writers who specialised in the ‘vignette’: a narrative form that contrasted to male-centred bush nationalisms of the ‘sketch’. Like the Trident and Heart of the Rose, this journal was caught somewhere in between the influences of fin-de-siècle decadence and newly emergent European modernism; its interest in international avant-garde literary aesthetics worked to stretch modernism into the antipodes, sometimes casting it as a kind of free-floating literary effect. Heart of the Rose presented translations of Paul Verlaine and essays on Baudelaire; but it also charted local, vernacular versions of these influences, offering up delirious visions of what a trans-national, trans-historical Australian literature might be. The Microbe and Hal Stone’s journals celebrated an amateur literary status that allowed them to satirise the Bulletin’s claim on Australian literary tastes. They also turned to the ‘vignette’, and played out the influences of European symbolism and nascent modernism; but they satirised the pretentions of journals like Heart of the Rose and never invested in a representative canon of writers. Together, these little magazines present an alternative literary scene that tried to re-imagine the ideals of a national literature even as they radically distinguished themselves from the mainstream

'On Species'

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The Postcolonial Ghost Story

This paper draws on Durkheim and Freud in discussing the Australian ghost story, referencing Rosa Praed's 'The Bunyip' and Percy Mumbulla's 'The Bunyip'

Did the English strategy reduce inequalities in health? A difference-in-difference analysis comparing England with three other European countries

Background: Between 1997 and 2010, the English government pursued an ambitious programme to reduce health inequalities, the explicit and sustained commitment of which was historically and internationally unique. Previous evaluations have produced mixed results. None of these evaluations have, however, compared the trends in health inequalities within England with those in other European countries. We carried out an innovative analysis to assess whether changes in trends in health inequalities observed in England after the implementation of its programme, have been more favourable than those in other countries without such a programme. Methods: Data were obtained from nationally representative surveys carried out in England, Finland, the Netherlands and Italy for years around 1990, 2000 and 2010. A modified difference-in-difference approach was used to assess whether trends in health inequalities in 2000-2010 were more favourable as compared to the period 1990-2000 in England, and the changes in trends in inequalities after 2000 in England were then compared to those in the three comparison countries. Health outcomes were self-assessed health, long-standing health problems, smoking status and obesity. Education was used as indicator of socioeconomic position. Results: After the implementation of the English strategy, more favourable trends in some health indicators were observed among low-educated people, but trends in health inequalities in 2000-2010 in England were not more favourable than those observed in the period 1990-2000. For most health indicators, changes in trends of health inequalities after 2000 in England were also not significantly different from those seen in the other countries. Conclusions: In this rigorous analysis comparing trends in health inequalities in England both over time and between countries, we could not detect a favourable effect of the English strategy. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of a modified difference-in-difference approach for assessing the impact of policies on population-level health inequalities.Peer reviewe